COMMUNICATION AND PARTICIPATIVE DECISION MAKING: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

Traditional models of participative decision making neglect the role subordinates play in establishing a participative environment. In this study, participative decision making is viewed as a social phenomenon defined through interaction between superiors and subordinates. Data obtained from 264 employees of a large social service organization were used to test hypotheses predicting positive associations between participation and superior-subordinate communication behavior. The results provide support for the contention that, for subordinates, participation in decision making is associated strongly with the quantity and quality of communication they experience with their superior. Considering the impact of superior-subordinate communication in the establishment of participative decision making may aid in understanding what preconditions are necessary before such arrangements can become successful.     

THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNICATION SKILLS IN PHYSICALLY HANDICAPPED CHILDREN

The present study was primarily concerned with the communication skill development of physically handicapped children. Since these children often are denied contact with peers because of their disabilities, it was suggested that they may be unable to develop the perspective-taking ability necessary for adapting communication to a specific listener. It was also suggested that the increased contact provided by moving the handicapped into regular public school classrooms may help alleviate this problem. First-, third-, and sixth-grade children, handicapped and nonhandicapped, with and without the others in their classes, were tested on their listener-adaptation abilities in general and their adaptation to handicapped children, using pictures as stimuli for messages. The results support the hypothesis that handicapped children are deficient in listener adaptation. Classroom association with “normals” seems to improve this, but does not raise them to the level of their nonhandicapped peers. Nonhandicapped children are unable to adapt to handicapped children, and contact with the handicapped does not seem to improve this situation. Being in an integrated class seems to have some positive effects on handicapped children and few effects on the nonhandicapped.     

Power-mapping—I. Background and basic methodology

Clinical and community psychology have yet to work out the full implications of taking seriously the structuring by power of the individual's social environment. Even the factor of social class has received little more than superficial attention. Some suggestions are offered as to why this might be so, and a theoretical framework for understanding psychological distress strictly as the result of the operation of social power is developed. A simple technique of ‘mapping’ power is outlined as a means for furthering such an understanding. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Counselors' Reports of Performance: Facilitative and Debilitative Cognitions in the Job Interview

Thirty vocational counselors participated in a job interview thought-listing procedure. Potentially facilitative and debilitative cognitions relating to the job interview were grouped and analyzed in terms of their frequency of occurrence and their impact. The results show that the interviewee's cognitions relate to social evaluation and the skilled performance of interview tasks.     

ESSENCE AGAINST IDENTITY

Abstract: This paper traces how the concern with political transformation is central both to arguments for and against essentialism. But while pro-essential argumentation is concerned with identity, as a condition of change, anti-essentialist reasoning sees change as dependent on the historical mutability of identity. Using Freud, this paper attempts to reconcile these positions through focusing first, on identification rather than identity; and second, on an unorthodox concept of essence, stressing its energetic commonality between beings.     

Work–family conflict,psychological availability,and child emotion regulation: Spillover and crossover in dual‐earner families

Work–family balance and child rearing are major social concerns. Few studies, however, have addressed how parents' work–family conflict (WFC) associates with children's emotion regulation. This study proposes the link to occur through parents' psychological availability (PA). In our model we tested both intraindividual and interindividual effects on a sample of 138 dual‐earner couples with preschool‐aged children. Our results showed that WFC related negatively to PA (actor and partner effects); fathers' and mothers' PA associated negatively with child lability and positively with child emotion regulation. Indirect effects were found for fathers' and mothers' WFC and children's emotion regulation and lability through partners' PA, controlling for child gender and temperament. These findings showed a dyadic pattern among couples' work–family balance, parenting, and children's emotion regulation.     

Perception of Occupational Gender Typing: A Replication on European Samples of Shinar's (1975) and Beggs and Doolittle's (1993) Studies1

College students' perceptions of the gender typing of 129 occupations were gathered from Spanish and French samples and compared with those reported by Shinar (1975) and Beggs & Doolittle (1993). Questionnaires were completed by 202 females and 158 males. As in the American studies, a continuum of the perception of occupations from feminine to masculine was replicated. The results indicate that (a) general mean ratings are closer to the masculine pole than to the feminine pole of the response scale, (b) European mean ratings are more gender‐neutral than are American mean ratings, (c) linear correlations between all four sets of ratings are very high, and (d) the linear association between French ratings and official employment figures for women in France is high.     

Images Versus Issues in the 1984 Presidential Election Differences Between Men and Women

Recent accounts of male and female personality development suggest that members of each sex differ in the orientations and capacities they bring to their experience of the political world. This article explores the relative importance of respondents’ images of the candidates and respondents’ political positions to predictions of males’ and females’ candidate preferences. It was predicted that candidate images based on interpersonal communication behavior, as opposed to respondents’ political positions, would be a more powerful predictor of females’ candidate preferences. The opposite pattern was expected to be the case for males’ candidate preferences. These predictions were supported; however, the data analysis also indicated that both candidate images and politkal positions contributed significantly to predictions of females’ candidate preferences.     

Nonverbal Interactional Behavior in the Families of Persons with Schizophrenic and Bipolar Disorders

Whereas verbal interactional behaviors have been repeatedly found to distinguish the families of persons with and without major psychiatric disorders, there has been comparatively little examination of the discriminative value of nonverbal interactional behaviors. We developed the Nonverbal Interactional Coding System to measure “affiliative” and “distancing” nonverbal behaviors in 18 schizophrenic and 18 bipolar patients and their parents during 10-minute interactions conducted during a posthospital period. Bipolar patients and their parents displayed affiliative nonverbal behaviors (“illustrator gestures” or “prosocial behaviors”) for longer durations than schizophrenic patients and their parents. In contrast, parents of schizophrenic patients displayed distancing nonverbal behaviors (looking away) for longer durations than those of bipolar patients. The nonverbal interactional data added to the statistical strength of patients’ and parents’ verbal interactional data in distinguishing between these diagnostic groups. Nonverbal interactional behaviors are important variables to consider in interventions aimed at improving the communication skills of families coping with psychiatric disorders.